Version Crawler

Open the Version Crawler window using the Open Crawler command at the top of the Window menu. You can either type in the full path to a folder you wish it to check and then click the Scan button, or leave the Folder text box empty and click on the Scan button to select the folder to be checked in a dialog.

After a few moments, the large text view will fill with the results of checking through the folder you chose. This lists the full path to each file which has more than one version in the versioning database, and the number of versions found by macOS. The final line states how many files were checked, and how many were found to have more than one version:

/Users/hoakley/Documents/0newDownloads/logstuff/LockRattlerF/Introducing LockRattler.rtfd has 13 versions.

/Users/hoakley/Documents/0newDownloads/logstuff/LockRattlerF/lockrattler2/LockRattlerSource.swift has 4 versions.

/Users/hoakley/Documents/0newDownloads/logstuff/LockRattlerF/LockRattlerCoder.txt has 9 versions.

Found 70 files with versions out of 33847 scanned in /Users/hoakley/Documents/0newDownloads/logstuff

Save that report by clicking on the Save button, which prompts you to give the name of a text file into which to write the results.

Perform further scans using the Scan button. ⚠️ If there is any text in the Folder text box, Revisionist will try to scan from that path and will not prompt you to select a folder. In the Folder text box, use the standard shorthand abbreviation of ~ to indicate the path to your Home folder, as in ~/Documents.

Clicking on the Get size button runs the shell script

du -sh /.DocumentRevisions-V100

which returns the current size of the versions database in megabytes (M) or gigabytes (G). Because this requires root privileges, you will be prompted to enter your admin user’s password. ⚠️ Note: this isn’t available in Catalina and later, due to restrictions in macOS.

The result is then shown in the text box next to that button. If the command returns an error, that will be indicated in that box instead. The Version Crawler window does not make any changes to anything on your Mac, but needs your password in order to run that command.

Increase the size of the text in this window up to 24 points using ⌘ + or reduce it down to 4 points using ⌘ –.

Close the Version Crawler window using its window control.

➜ details

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The Eclectic Light Company – https://eclecticlight.co